We SHARE knowledge

Share Conference is the newest thing started by the State of Exit Foundation - the founders of the now renowned EXIT fest. This conference managed to gather international stars from the field of Internet and social activism, as well as artists from the sphere of new media as well as renowned musicians. What have we managed to do on this interesting project:

Besides dealing with very short time frames, where we had to do organize and create the basic version of the site acting as a data distribution platform. On the day of the conference, we also managed to launch an interesting home page that brought together all sorts of services and media which informed visitors about the schedule and location of the lectures.

The conference program was divided into two parts - SHARE by day (lectures) and SHARE by night (music/parties) and conceptualized/designed in two modes (day/night toggle modes) where the logo and page colors change depending on the selected mode. Check out the guest list here.
The common denominator in this case for all services was JSON data-interchange format which gave this page a life of its own.

Flickr feed

Accredited photographs had access to Flickr accounts, and through simple uploading they could edit sets or that part of the webpage, respectively. Take a look at the rather simple and functional gallery. Drupal was set to fetch JSON objects every 5 minutes.

JSON Object:

Twitter wall

Perhaps one of the most important things where users could generate content themselves and share the impressions of the conference was the Twitter wall. By entering standardized tags #shareconference, #sharebyday, #sharebynight - tweets were generated on the site in 1 minute intervals. Depending on the hash tag, the tweet would be marked by different colors: pink, yellow and blue. This type of communication has proven to be quite successful because the content is generated by the user, therefore was a "sincere" or a more realistic insight towards what was happening during the conference.

Besides this, photos and videos were also shared through tweets. The most used services for photos were Twittpic, Plixi, Yfrog and for video - Twittvid, You Tube, Vimeo, Yfrog. Link were analyzed through PHP and were sent in a certain format to be embedded. For every service we had to do a little research in terms of their APIs, while the code was based on universal IDs or rather the extraction and formatting of URLs based on a certain format. Useful information:

Another interesting addition was the Twitter short URL system that turned phone image URLs (http://yfrog.com/h08frjoj) into (http://t.co/W3X09A3). These could then be unpacked by the Untiny.me API service by a simple reference to http://untiny.me/api/1.0/extract?url=http://t.co/W3X09A3&format=json which unpacks the URL and further analyzes it.

Untiny.me support more than 230 short URL services

Throughout the conference, the following were shared:

more than 4200 tweets

300 images

100 videos

there were also no violations of the tweet wall and no tweet was banned

Foursquare

Foursquare is a relatively new geosocial network in Serbia and therefore - not too popular. We took this opportunity to further popularize this service and share information in new way ;) For those who don’t know, similar services such as Google Latitude and Facebook Places also exist. We have created a map with seven SHARE locations where users could check-in to an event and allow them to post certain tips and comment.

All you need to do in order to connect to Foursquare is to create and authorization and used their API. In this case, we used two objects:

https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/{VENUE_ID}/herenow

https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/{VENUE_ID}/tips

Mobile platforms

We have also created iPhone and Android applications for the conference. Along the more static content, the application also contained a tweet wall or a "live tweet feed" as we came to call it. Using XML, we provided information from Twitter allowing application users to follow what was happening at the conference. They’re available for download and you can check them out here: